"I see in the near future a crisis approaching
that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country.
As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of
corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country
will endeavor to prolong its reign... until all wealth is aggregated in
a few hands, and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more
anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst
of the war."

- ABRAHAM LINCOLN (1864)

Corporate Power vs. A People's
Agenda:A Position Paper of the Alliance
for Democracy

By Phil and Sue
Wheaton

The Reality of Corporate Power

In August 1995, Ronnie Dugger, founder of the
Alliance for Democracy,sounded a call for citizens and "real populists"
to "please stand up" andretake control of our country from the mega-corporations
that have come todominate society. In an historic article in The
Nation he declared:

We are ruled by Big Business and Big Government
as its paid hireling, andwe know it. Corporate money is wrecking popular
government in the UnitedStates. The big corporations and the centimillionaires
and billionaireshave taken daily control of our work, our
pay, our housing, our health,our pension funds, our bank and savings deposits,
our public lands, ourairwaves, our elections and our very government.
It's as if Americandemocracy has been bombed.1

Dugger pointed to a reality that increasing numbers
of engaged citizensare coming to understand: a people's agenda -
a fairness agenda - isunlikely to be realized as long as those who
control the huge corporationsare calling the shots based on maximization of
profits over the needs andrights of workers, ordinary people, and the welfare
of the planet itself.As anti-MAI crusader, Tony Clarke of Canada,
stated at the 1997 Allianceconvention, "It doesn't matter whom you elect
if the tools of corporatepower remain in place."

The goal of these transnational corporations is
world control. DavidKorten, in his ground-breaking book, When
Corporations Rule the World,points out that through the international financial
organizations whichserve corporate and market interests, the corporations
dictate to nationstates. He declares that "Globalization has rendered
many of the politicalroles of government obsolete...." Even
more disturbing, he warns:

The architects of the corporate global vision
seek a world in whichuniversalized symbols created and owned by
the world's most powerfulcorporations replace the distinctive cultural
symbols that link people toparticular places, values and human communities.
When control of ourcultural symbols passes to corporations, we
are essentially yielding tothem the power to define who we are.2

Jim Hightower correctly labels this corporate
rule and global domination"class warfare" with the corporate giants and
investor elites making outlike bandits. There is, he says, a winner-take-all
attitude built into thecorporate mentality that commands top managers
to produce as muchmoney as possible, and as quickly as possible,
no matter who is eliminatedor run down in the process.

Is there no alternative to this takeover by huge
corporations? Dugger,Korten and Hightower all believe there is if
we pool our efforts and worktogether for the common good. Hightower
explains what this means byunderscoring his Dad's philosophy: "Everyone
does better when everyonedoes better."

The Growth of Corporate Power in
the U.S.

Corporations have not always had the enormous
power they have today. Richard and Frank T. Adams point out in their
excellent booklet "Taking Careof Business" (Charter Ink, 1995, Cambridge, MA)
that in the early years of ourcountry, state legislators granted corporate
charters to build turnpikes, canalsand bridges. Corporate charters were usually
restricted to a set number of years,and legislatures often decided not to renew them.
Incorporated businesses wereprohibited from taking any action which legislators
did not specifically allow.

So how did these corporations gain the incredible
power they have today?As far back as 1819 in Dartmouth College v. Woodward,
the Supreme Courtbegan to strip states of their ability to control
corporate charters. Manycitizens then believed that exceeded the high
court's authority. But it wasthe Civil War that provided the enormous funding
that enabled corporations toamass their first fortunes. They were chartered
to supply the Union Army and manyof them delivered shoddily-made shoes, malfunctioning
guns, and rotten meat.Abraham Lincoln viewed the rise of corporations
as a disaster, writing to a friendin 1864:

I see in the near future a crisis approaching
that unnerves me andcauses me to tremble for the safety of my
country. As a result of thewar, corporations have been enthroned and
an era of corruption in highplaces will follow, and the money power of
the country will endeavor toprolong its reign... until all wealth is aggregated
in a few hands, andthe Republic is destroyed. I feel at this
moment more anxiety for thesafety of my country than ever before, even
in the midst of the war.3

Historian Howard Zinn describes how, during the
last quarter of the 19thcentury, in industry after industry,

...shrewd and efficient businessmen were building
empires, choking outcompetition, maintaining high prices, keeping
wages low, using governmentsubsidies. These industries were the first
beneficiaries of the "welfare state."The banks had so many of these monopolies
as to create an interlockingnetwork of powerful corporation directors,
each of whom sat on the boardsof many other corporations.4

With the Spanish-American War, U.S. corporations
began to move abroad,backed up by the U.S. Marines. The goal was not
to drive colonial Spainout of Cuba and Puerto Rico, but to gain control
over the Caribbean anduse Hawaii, the Philippines and Guam as stepping-stones
to the markets ofthe Orient. Zinn says this was "a natural development
of the twin drivesof capitalism and nationalism." A Washington
Post editorial declared in1898:

A new consciousness seems to have come upon
us - the consciousnessof strength.... Ambition, interest, land,
hunger, pride, the mere joy offighting, whatever it may be, we are animated
by a new sensation. We areface to face with a strange destiny. The taste
of Empire is in the mouthof the people even as the taste of blood in
the jungle....5

Strange destiny indeed! These are the more distant
roots of a presentreality which is now becoming evident throughout
the land and throughoutthe world. Not only is the corporate drive
for profit and power supersedingpeople and principles, but we the American people
have often been complicitwith this pattern, and only We The People can
alter it.

Our Enchantment with Corporate
Power & Its Promise of the Good Life

The Depression of the 1930's seemed to reject
the euphoria of the "Danceof the Millions" which followed World War I,
while the welfare state ofFranklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1930s seemed
to offer a governmentalversion of the common good. But after World War
II, that changed and thedrive for the good life turned our thoughts to
modernity and materialism.

Environmentalist writer Jerry Mander describes
what happened:

The new value system that was sold in the forties
and fifties was designedto fuel the most massive expansion of U.S.
industrial and marketing sectorsin history. The 'American way of life' became
an advertising theme; it drewan explicit equation between how much you
consumed and how Americanyou were.... To say that we, the public, had
no participation in these vastchanges would be inaccurate. By our silence
we gave our tacit approval....It all happened so fast, and with SO MUCH
POWER, it was difficult to graspwhat was changing, as it was changing. The
process itself overpowered alldoubt. We asked no questions....6

During the 1980's we were told by President Ronald
Reagan that we couldboth spend enormous sums on the military and
at the same times reducetaxes. It was an economist's fantasy which became
a corporate gold mineand a people's nightmare. The United States fell
into massive debt. Butcorporations kept on expanding as markets grew,
subsidies kept flowing,and the stock market, despite fluctuations, kept
rising. This allowedcorporations to keep most of their enormous profits
and the good timesseemed to have no limits. But a day of reckoning
was at hand for workersand farmers.

Benjamin Friedman and Al Krebs explain what happened
to these two keysectors of the American labor force. Friedman
on workers:

Of all the new year-round full-time jobs created
since 1979, 36 percenthave provided workers with less than half
of what the average worker madein 1973.... The prospect of economic advancement
is simply disappearing formany Americans. The typical worker no longer
earns what his father or olderbrother earned at a comparable age a decade
or two before.7

Al Krebs paints an even bleaker picture for the
American farmer:

Not only have individual lives been stripped
away, but entire rural communitiesare disappearing. The number of U.S. farms
have declined from 6.8 million in 1935to under 2.1 million in 1989. The years 1985-1986
alone saw the loss of over112,000 farms....As one farmer told me, "the
earth is bleeding and I can't stop the hemorrhaging."8

Yet many affluent Americans, contented and indifferent,
went on spending andconsuming as these former mainstays of U.S. society
fell by the wayside. Contraryto what the corporate libertarians would have
us believe, David Korten warns:Embellished by promises of limitless and effortless
affluence, the vision of a globaleconomy has an entrancing appeal. Beneath
its beguiling surface, however, we finda modern form of enchantment, a siren song
created by the skilled image makers of Madison Avenue, enticing societies
to weaken community to free the market, eliminate livelihoods to create
wealth, and destroy life to increase unneeded and oftenunsatisfying consumption.9

So, Where Do We Go From Here?

We cannot hope to break out of the control by
these huge transnationalcorporations through piecemeal measures or the
reform of existing tradeagreements or projected corporate strategies.
As long as the goal of themultinational corporations and international
banks is total control of themarketplace and at forcing nation states to capitulate
to their wishes,reform is meaningless. The situation requires
more fundamental change.

Just as the Clinton Administration promised to
reform NAFTA by attachingtwo side agreements (on labor rights and environmental
protections) whichnever materialized, so too, the draconian conditions
projected by theupcoming Multilateral Agreement on Investments
(MAI) demonstrate we cannothope to reform projects and policies which only
serve the interests of thepowerful.

Before we can hope to achieve real progress toward
economic justice, itseems to us that we must first awaken the American
people to the imminentcrisis facing us in the United States and to
the even worse reality forpeople in Third World societies. Clearly, alternative
visions and specificprojects are already being developed and should
be implemented fromoutside the parameters of the existing system,
but to alter the New WorldOrder, we must first develop a broad popular
consciousness about thethreat of corporate power.

The problem with corporate power consists of more
than specific immoralpolicies and unjust practices. By their very
nature, large corporations use peopleand love things. That is, they have no
fundamental moral principle except thatof greater profit; they have no soul. The reason,
says Jerry Mander, is thatcorporations have no corporeality, in the sense
that they are basically concepts:a name, bank account, a legal entity. Their basic
drive is to expand and make money, profit being the only standard by which
a company is deemed worthy. In Mander's view,

All other values are secondary: community welfare,
the happiness of workers,the health of the planet, even general prosperity....In
this sense a corporation is essentially a machine, a technological structure,
an organization that follows its own principles and its own morality, and
in which human morality is anomalous.10

This is why corporate power as global ruler is
so dangerous: it refuses tobe accountable to people, democracy and society.
It wants free reign topursue its ends without any public limitations
or governmental controls.Thus, its fundamentally anti-democratic nature.
This is why WE THE PEOPLEmust bring these monster corporations back under
our control. Otherwise,these powerful THINGS, will continue to usurp
OUR fundamental freedoms.

Ideally, all corporations should have only one
reason to exist: to serve peopleand communities. Because power and greed have
led large corporations to assumethey can control societies and rule the world,
we must challenge their basicassumptions even as we develop a peoples' agenda
for the coming era.